Book review: Mrinal Pande. The Journey of Hindi Language Journalism in India: From Raj to Swaraj and Beyond
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230241289450 |
| Author | Ravikant |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
Book Reviews 357
ORCID iD
Anamika Asthana https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0006-1324
Anamika Asthana
Symbiosis School of International Studies
Symbiosis International (deemed) University
Pune, Maharashtra, India
E-mail: anamika.asthana@ssispune.edu.in
Mrinal Pande. The Journey of Hindi Language Journalism in India: From Raj to Swaraj and Beyond. Orient
BlackSwan, 2022; 176 pp., `1195.
DOI: 10.1177/23210230241289450
This fine-printed, slim volume, focused on an ambitiously long temporal survey of Hindi journalism,
signposts a large number of headlines of its own for the small sections within chapters. While the challenge
of what to pick from a bewildering variety of media forms that may be defined as journalism remains, the
story of Hindi print is indubitably a compelling one and some of the discussions are incisive. Not the least
because they are offered by a bilingual insider and a veteran media practitioner with aeons of experience of
working across corporate houses in print and TV—as reporter, editor, columnist, fiction writer, as well as
the only woman chairperson of the Prasar Bharati Board. Making full use of the media trade and subscription
data published in corporate and government reports, Pande takes us through some of the eventful passages
that have brought us to the current state of manufactured consensus and designer, feel-good interviews
routinely showcased by the ‘godi media’, that is, the one ensconced in the lap of the government.
‘Godi media’, a ubiquitously cited and readily understood term, is a lexical invention by very well-
known news reporter-anchor Ravish Kumar. Going beyond denoting the familiar conventions of handing
down one-way communication by the state-owned television and radio channels, print products, websites
and mobile apps, ‘godi media’ includes private outlets that were under no obligation to toe the state and
ruling party line, but have been doing exactly that, unscrupulously and uncritically. The book avoids the
term, but in the historical narrative presented here, we do find its early traces, lineages and building
blocks, especially after the turn towards a globalized neo-liberal order that heralded a period of ‘paid
news’ in print media. Paradoxically, the mainstream press was also labelled as ‘presstitute’ by the same
powers that are gleefully patronizing it while routinely harassing small, independent and critical voices.
Within this largely depressing narrative of a moral free fall from the haloed days of a formidable anti-
colonial patriotic struggle, and a valiant revival after the clampdown during the Emergency recounted by
the author, we must add that it still remains a rapidly changing and vibrant mediascape, if we enlarge our
optics beyond print and consider it as an intermedia space.
This book, however, is a history of Hindi journalism defined narrowly as print media, with long jumps
and major elisions. The author does underline certain important distinctions vis-a-vis the confident
European bourgeois public sphere theorized by Jurgen Habermas, and dwells upon Gandhi’s own theory
and practice of media autonomy from advertisement, a legacy that continued as a reluctance to embrace
advertising in the decades after independence. One of the competitive battles the Hindi press fought and
ultimately won was against the English newspapers and magazines that remained advertisers’ favourites
owing to the deep pockets their subscribers supposedly possessed. The notion was revised when Hindi
readership made an obvious leap in the 1980s with the rise in literacy and middle-class numbers in the
U.P. and undivided Bihar. The surveys, Pande tells us, conducted by such corporate houses as Hindustan
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